Causes of the Cold War:
Social; The difference in opinion of communism. The west was opposed to communism and wanted the people to be "free" thus they wanted democracy to be used around the world, yet a democracy was not widely viewed as the best form of government hence conflict arose.
Political; Basically the United States and the Soviet Union had different opinions and could not settle their contrasting political views. (US=democracy, SU=communism)
Economic; The US was encouraging free trade throughout the world. But the Soviet Union wanted to use their own international commerce.Thus conflict arose in the fact that they weren't seeing eye to eye in what kind of trade should take place.
Overall I think the primary cause was the political views being different between the US and the Soviet Union. The US was merely pushing for democracy and couldn't see the benefits in being a communist nation, plus the US seemed to assume that any one that was communist would want to take over the world hence emotions ran high as well. The Soviet Union on the other hand saw democracy as a slow rolling process and no way to run a country, thus they didn't understand why the US was pushing so hard for their political views to be used by others.
I think that both nations were to blame for the cold war. They were both close minded and unwilling to so any benefits in the opposing views.
I agree with Alysa that the primary cause of the Cold War was political differences. The ideological contrasts between Democracy and Communism escalated into global competition. But I also think this could arguably be a social cause. The U.S. population was so deathly afraid of a Communist world take-over, that they influenced their government and caused some of the desperate actions that heightened the tension between the two countries. So, I think you could also argue that social causes were the most significant.
ReplyDeleteI think that you were spot on with your they are both to blame statement. I think that if the two countries could have gotten over the fact that there are different forms of government than their own and let developing countried find what worked the best for them, we could have avoided this whole situation. People need to open their minds and accept countries with whatever form of government they have.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that both social and political were to blame for the Cold War, but I also agree that BOTH countries were to blame. We kind of acted like toddlers here and thought we could out run each other with nuclear weapons and then that would some how show which ideology was the "winner."
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